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here—what little there was of it.
    â€œNo sweat. Thanks, huh?”
    â€œHave you seen your friend Floyd Chambers?”
    â€œNo. Fact I’ve been asking around about him.”
    â€œI was the one assigned to help him secure a unit with this Section 8 voucher. And, well, you know he didn’t come in for it last week.”
    Magrady stuck out his hand. “What’s your name?”
    â€œCarl. Carl Fjeldstrom. I’m interning here from the public policy program over at UCLA.”
    â€œDoes Floyd have a brother or sister you tried?” Despite knowing the missing man for more than seven years, Magrady was unfamiliar with much of Chambers’ personal history. Such was the closed-book existence many of those down and out maintained.
    Fjeldstrom said, “I didn’t have an address but there was a number for a sister that I called, but it was disconnected. And I got nothing from Google or information.”
    â€œWhat’s her name?”
    â€œSally, Sally Prescott,” he answered after consulting a slim folder he plucked off of a nearby desk. “The number was an Inglewood one,” he muttered, re-reading something in the file.
    Magrady wondered what else might be in Chambers’ file but decided not to push it with the intern. He would ask Bonilla later to have a look. “I’ll ask around about her. If the number was funky, then Floyd probably hasn’t seen her for a while.”
    The younger man frowned. “Most of this, and as you can see it isn’t much, is from an intake done a few years ago by someone who doesn’t work here anymore. I only met with Floyd one time. When I asked him to update his information he took a quick look, said it was cool, and that was that.”
    Magrady asked, “What changed that you’d get on his case now? I mean, I know they have to keep you busy, but why was Floyd all of a sudden in the running for an apartment?”
    â€œSubbaKhan,” Fjeldstrom said tersely.
    Magrady waited.
    â€œThe fallout from negotiating with them has had a positive ripple effect with some of the other developers along or near the Figueroa Corridor. This particular landlord who has several buildings around here,” he indicated the streets beyond the walls, “and near the ’SC campus has been salivating to go condo.”
    Magrady nodded. The Corridor was the term organizer types used to describe the stretch of Figueroa Street from thenorthern end where SubbaKhan’s Emerald Shoals complex was under construction heading south into the predominantly Latino and black areas where even there, land speculation fever had blossomed. Before and particularly after World War II, South Central had been populated with black migrants from the Southwest and Deep South. Then you could get a house with a down payment from your GI Bill or maybe the check you pulled down working for the city’s gas company or the railroad. Magrady, whose folks came from the Mississippi Delta, settled in Chicago, where he grew up running with the Blackstone Rangers.
    â€œWhat with Emerald Shoals having more bling than this guy can muster, thus already enticing the upscalers he hoped to seduce, he decided it was worth his while to have his buildings remain apartments, and agreed to some low-income set-asides to fill vacancies.”
    The vet, who consistently had to put up with this sort of inside baseball minutiae from Bonilla, had tuned the sincere young man out without letting on. “I guess Floyd came up in the rotation,” he said to prevent Fjeldstrom from going on.
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œThanks for your time, Carl, I appreciate it,” he added quickly.
    They shook hands again. He still didn’t have a solid lead on a roof for tonight but was juiced trying to figure out where Floyd was and what that had to do with the murder of Jeff Curray, the pissant gangsta who’d gone by the tag Savoirfaire. At the TransPacific Bank on